General News
General News Posts
Anyone fancy some of my banana loaf?
… in the making 🙂 Fullscreen for Hi-Def
G20 revisited – Simon Harwood to be taken to trial
A long time ago I posted about the G20 protest which I attended to photograph the events as they unfolded.
I was (un)lucky enough to be at the place where Ian Tomlinson was pushed to the ground by PC Simon Harwood and I photographed the first shots of him lying on the floor before I ran off to get medical help.The picture I took when I returned to him was the main one used by The Sun the next day.
The case is now coming to a close and I’ve just read today that the jury concluded that "Mr Tomlinson had been unlawfully killed and that PC Harwood had used "excessive and unreasonable force"".
My G20 Stock Images Is Simon Harwood the evil face of the Police force as the Media and protest groups would have us believe?
Doubtful. Most police that I know just want to help and protect the public.
I guess there are exceptions to any rule, but only his friends and family know his true character.Should he pay for his actions on the 1st April 2009?
Two regular guys go to a pub on a Friday night and during the night a scuffle breaks out.
One of the guys gets caught up in the fight and hits someone who falls, smacks their head on the ground and doesn’t get up.
The guy will go to court and, even though it was an accident, he will be tried and charged for manslaughter.Pretty much what happened at the G20. An action that was the catalyst for an unfortunate death.
Time will tell on the final result, but I’m hoping that justice will run it’s course.
What’s good for the goose and all that 😉What is unusual is that, for the first time, the misconduct hearing of a police officer will be held in public. It looks like they’re offering the lamb up for public slaughter in order to appease the image of the police force (look – we’re reprimanding our own).
On a positive note – the ‘blood money’ I received for my picture in the sun which I gave to the Guide Dogs for the Blind has matured and Otis (the black lab I helped sponsor) is now with his new owner 🙂
Backups – are they really that important?
As it’s the end of the month I thought I’d ask your opinion – Are backups important?
For me, the answer is twofold:
1) Can I afford to lose any of my data? [No]
2) How long do I want to spend repairing/recovering any missing data? [As little as possible]For many people backups aren’t important and they don’t care about re-building their PC or MAC now and again when it get’s screwy.
As a photographer I’m fairly paranoid about my data (both business and pictures), but I’m fortunate to come from an IT background so I thought I’d share with you my backup procedure as part of my workflow.
If I’m on location then I’ll no doubt have my laptop with me, so I’ll transfer data from my memory cards to my laptop before I head back. The Laptop has an SSD so the data on it is pretty safe 🙂
Once back in front of my Editing PC I’ll import all the cards into a folder [yyyymmdd_client] and I won’t erase the cards until they’re about to be re-used, which ensures an extra level of recoverability.
I’ll immediately backup all the untouched RAW and .XMP files onto DVDs (which are stored off-site) and at the same time kick off a copy to my on-board secondary data disk and also to my server.
That’s 3-4 backups already and I haven’t even seen the files yet.
In addition to the DVD, local and server backup, I also have an external RAID box which I back up to when I’ve either finished editing and/or at the end of the day. There are 2 disks in there which mirror each other (RAID0). Every month I rotate out the second disk with a third disk which I keep in a top secret off-site location (my mums :)) and with the fresh disk in it’ll automatically re-build the Mirror.
When these disks are full, all 3 go into storage and are replaced by 3 brand new ones 🙂
So all in all I have 5-7 backups of my data. If the primary source fails then I have multiple redundancy methods to recover what I need 😀
My Laptop (which I use mainly for business use and an emergency editing PC) is backed up weekly to the server plus 1 extra external disk.
At the end of the month I have 3 off-site disks which I do another set of backups.
If that wasn’t enough I also run a Ghost of my system drive every 2 months, so if I get a virus or some new software or an update breaks the laptop, then it’s easy to re-install the last image and get back into action pronto.So far I’ve had to recover the Laptop twice from rubbish applications messing up my system, but the Ghost recovery takes literally about 10 minutes, which is no-time at all compared to a complete re-install from scratch.
If my SSD was to go kaput, then I have spare disks at the ready and I can be up and running in 15 minutes flat.
Worst case scenario – all my machines are attacked by ninja squirrels and trashed beyond repair.
My data is still safe in the HDD backups I keep off-site as well as the DVD’s which I can use as a last resort for recovery should I need them.In the future I see data being stored in a Cloud System, but current DSL is still too slow to upload at a decent speed 🙁
So, do you back up or don’t you believe it’s worth taking the time to do it?
KTM X-Bow
A little while back I made a call out to various car forums offering a free photoshoot. I was looking to take some shots of some hyper exotic or rare cars to add to my portfolio and I had a good response.
The advantage of doing this was that I could pick and choose the cars I was shooting …. and one of these cars was this… the KTM X-Bow owned and driven by Richard Hallam of RRH Autos.
While this car isn’t an exotica in the same way as a Pagani Zonda or Ferrari F450, it is extremely rare. Even more rare is Richard’s BDM:300 which is stoooopid fast (0-60 in under 3s).
On the day of the shoot we were losing light fast. I was hoping for an extra hour of daylight, but over the winter time it was in short supply.
We borrowed a neighbours garage to do some of the shots and then headed into Guildford to do some of the tracking shots. Pics below
